One of the great innovations in the Mac software world has been Allan Odgaard’s Textmate text editor. In fact, I’m using it to compose this very entry.
It does about a million things to make typing text so much easier, integrated searches to Google and returning the “I’m feeling lucky” entry, automatically closing a “” pair, the list goes on and on.
But there are just so many features! To this problem, the Textmate crew turned an enterprising eye, they started making screencasts of “how to be effective in this application.” Genius, pure genius.
Many of the screencasts are done by Odgaard himself and his voice has a certain soporific quality to it. I can feel the gentle purring of the hard drives in his machine (charlie), I can hear the solid clicks of an ergonomic keyboard (what kind of keyboard is that, Allan?), the daintier clicks of a mouse, and the Danish-tinged accentation of English.
Now this is not to bring into question his command of English, for it is truly superb, it’s just his narration, his friendly and calming timbre that makes me want to ponder the slow peace of carbon monoxide poisioning….zzzzzzz
I kid you not, in a 10 minute screencast I found myself out by minute 7. One wouldn’t think it possible.
Then again, I did fall asleep whilst The Social Bobcat was playing Alice in Chains’ “Dirt” in our 20 square foot dorm room one rainy afternoon…when the speakers were immediately over my bed.
I’m back in San Jose this week, back in the Silicon Valley.
It’s strange to be back because it was an October, 6 years ago, that began my career in high-tech, and my life in the Silicon Valley.
I’d like to write more, but business and catching up with friends here has the days so hectic I can’t be properly reflective, I’ll fill this one in once I get a bit more time
Hey there visitors. It’s been a heckovabusy week. I’ve been battling that old battleaxe of an LDAP Server again, but this time I’ve got it beat. Little did it know that while it was limping along I built a clone of it to which i’ve slowly been exporting information. The new kid on the block is almost ready to step into the limelight, I’ve been writing tools to make administering this machine easier.
Soon comeuppance shall be had.
But due to this heckofabusy week, no thanks to the LDAP daemon from hell, I was well in the mood for some relaxation with my girl so we headed to the Alamo south and caught the late showing of The Science of Sleep starring Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal and Franco-Anglo queen of skinny legs, Charlotte Gainsbourg.
This movie is the very fantastical tale of young Stephane whose dreams interfere with his ability to live, but whose dreamlike sense of magic make those who interact with him in reality ( or were they dreams hmmm? ) lives all the more fantastic and dare I say beautiful.
It’s this sense of visual poetry, of magic, of innocence that the Francophonic directors ( I say this to include Belgians! ) do exceedingly well: Amelie, Eternal Sunshine on the Spotless Mind, etc.). Incidentally, this is also done aurally in the works of the band Air.
In any case, what’s particularly nice is that both Stephane and his neighbor Stephanie are into crafts ( she works at a stationary store, one of those beautiful raphsodic stationary stores that you only seem to find in Europe or San Francisco, the kind of pornographic sheaves of A4 paper with percentages of cardstock labeled in the endless cubbyholes, the kind where they give you genuine cotton hankercheifs wherewith to dab the ends of nibs, etc.) so their daydreams ( and Stephane’s dreams ) are made of cardboard and tempra. A car he steals is made of cardboard cutouts, a double-barreled shotgun he grabs is made of long cardboard tubes.
While whimsical, it’s for the most part quite engaging.
Many times his dreams take place with these craft-y elements in stop-motion animated realms, think Peter Gabriel’s astounding “Sledgehammer” video from yesteryear.
Charlotte Gainsbourg is outstanding and I love the way she acts. I also like that she, visually, has a real-ness about her. In one scene she’s off to take her vaiselle to the laundromat in jeans and a cozy sweater: I have no issue whatsoever imagining that instead of YSL she knows how to do these things herself. I love that reality about her.
The only complaint I really had is that at times the whole fantasy world schtick got in the way of progressing the plot a little bit. Sometimes I was thinking, oh, bloody heck, let’s have the world stay the normal world so that we can see some basic reality here….but I suppose that may have also been an effect of it getting rather late and me being a bit tired.
Nevertheless, the movie never failes to be sweet and charming and enjoyable, I say take your snuggly one and enjoy.
Today Pope Benedict the XVI got rid of limbo as the place for the unbaptised souls of children.
Enjoy heaven, babies!
I mean, really, how can anyone take any religion seriously after this? One morning, a guy wakes up, eats some breakfast, notes the weather is turning cold in Rome, and then decides to dispose of religious element before his morning intestinal evacuation.
I’m not an atheist but the do have good T-Shirts: “When you can explain why you dismiss all other gods, you’ll understand why I dismiss yours.”
This is why my interpretation of Christianity always goes back to the mystic, the gnostic. It doesn’t have any logical understructure, and by virtue of this, doesn’t require an immutable codex of laws and behaviours. It merely says “The mysteries can be revealed and in the mean time, stop being a selfish snot.” If you build a religion on an edifice of “Here’s it all laid out once, rationally perfectly” you’re just asking for time or science ( or both ) to bring the whole circus tent crashing down.
I guess I’m really soured on the Christian religious machine after watching the sad, but wonderufully produced documentary, The Eyes of Tammy Faye. I highly recommend it. Tammy seems a genuinely nice, decent, Christian woman who, for all her work, decency, dreaming, and devotion seems to have gotten steamrollered at every corner. People deserve peace.
Oh, schnap, I forgot to mention that I bought tickets for LADYTRON who are playing Stubb’s in October.
It’s a bit weird because I never imagined that Ladytron go outside and Stubb’s is an outdoor venue. I guess it’s that whole ‘futuristic jumpsuit’ look that makes me think they must live inside brushed steel structures on Bauhaus furniture phlegmatically drifting like post-industrial shades from powerbooks to synthesizers, to chaise lounges, to a painfully white kitchen where they drink champagne and sushi.
This image of Ladytron has changed a bit with their recent market repositioning as possessing a bit of a fashionista mode.
Sunday night after Laur. came back from her day at work we were both a bit anxious to get out of the house. My friend The Social Bobcat had given me a ‘Go’ game as a groomsman gift (schweet) and so we decided to give it a, uh, go, at Austin Java on Barton Springs.
Go is one of those ancient games of farthest asia that always seems to attract nerdy computer guys faster than rumours that Jun Kunasagi (if you do any googling for her, it’s probably not going to be safe for work) is washing a car in the parking lot.
sound of a thousand be-Teva’d feet running to the door
The set is very nice, but the instructions left a bit to be desired. The sublime zen nature of Go and the sublime zen nature of engrish left us not entirely sure if we were playing right. The essence of the rules was discerned, but we couldn’t be entirely sure we were doing it right, or seeing the subtelty.
Nevertheless we played, trying to remember rules and then realizing that our relatively glacial rate of play had whiled away the hours to bedtime so we declared the game played and went back home.
I’ve found this very good interactive tutorial and plan on learning some more of the basics.
After watching Reform School Girls you’d have to be an un-curious person to not want to go and find out more about the life and times of Wendy O(rlean) Williams.
This lady was absolutely fearless.
In her death scene, she moves taut sinews and flesh like a wounded animal. In those few seconds she communicates more animal domination and charisma than any pop star Idolette I’ve ever seen.
If you watch a bit of her videos with The Damned on youtube you see the macho, the preening, the presence, you can feel the way she tells you about the car crash that’s coming, crashes the car, and leaves you gaping at what she just made you see.
Wendy took on the male establishment, clothing, and Mrs. Fields ( comparing the snack food queen to a purveyor of heroin ).
She obliterated the dialectic by her sheer daring, by her anti-art band, by her outrageous being.
Wendy ender her life at 48, in the woods, with a very lucid suicide note. It’s in times of truthiness, and lies and lies and lies about what our government is become and what it does that someone like this has the ability to grab eyes and hold them and subvert the normal baseline for society.
Cultural dyanmite: Nietzsche, Williams, bra-burning, the Enlightenment, the printing press, the Gettysburg Address.
The world could have used a grandma-age Wendy, mohawked, fearless, vegetarian, and steely in these times.
In a rare moment of pure non-work based relaxation I’m updating this blog and am watching the pure genre-trash movie: Reform School Girls featuring Wendy O. Williams.
I knew it was going to be pure trash when I saw a shower scene, teased hair, the same typeface used in the Police Academy movies, Wendy O. Williams, 2 scenes of, uh, sapphic voyeurism and a cat fight within the first 15 minutes.
September just had me running too hard for too long, weddings, bachelor parties, on-call rotation, system meltdowns. It was just too much.
In other news
Apparently “Rockabilly Filly” Rosie Flores is back in Austin and doing a regular set in North Austin. Her musical style is a very fun mix of rockabilly, tejano, and surf. Totally cool, eh?!